As this year’s legislative session barrels toward its April 4 conclusion, a wide-ranging, bipartisan bid to limit institutional investor activity in local housing markets appears to be sputtering — at least until next year.
Powerful hedge funds, private equity groups, and real estate investment trusts have bought up tens of thousands of single-family homes across Georgia, driving up housing prices and shutting out first-time homebuyers from already expensive markets. In response, Republican and Democratic state lawmakers alike proposed a battery of legislation to curb their influence on Georgia housing markets.
This year, legislators have filed more bills to regulate these institutional investors than the Gold Dome has ever seen — including proposals to allow landlord registries, establish corporate homebuying caps, and prohibit price-fixing.
But all except one of these bills stalled in the House before Crossover Day, the March 6 deadline for bills to jump from one legislative chamber to the other for a chance at becoming law. That said, they could potentially be revived next year, since Georgia has a two-year legislative session. (It’s also possible for lawmakers to transplant legislative language from slow-moving bills into ones that have had more success.)
Still showing signs of real promise this year is a bill that requires out-of-state real estate investment firms to employ at least one in-state employee to handle tenant concerns. House Bill 399 passed the House on March 3 and seems bound for a Senate vote before Sine Die on April 4, which is the last day of the 2025 half of the session.
HB 399 has proved the easiest pill to swallow for the powerful landlord and realtor lobbies. All other legislative efforts to loosen Wall Street’s grip on Georgia’s housing markets faced fierce pushback, partisan politicking, or the natural struggle to gain traction that many bills face when they aim to quickly address relatively new phenomena — like the corporate takeover of housing markets that surged with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There is recognition that has not waned of the reality that significant portions of our single-family housing stock is being bought by out-of-state hedge fund-type investors,” HB 399’s author, Rep. Mary Margaret Oliver (D-Decatur), told Atlanta Civic Circle in an interview. “But like with every other issue in the 2025 session that is being temporarily held up, almost no Democrat bill is quote-unquote eligible yet to be heard by the Senate Rules Committee.”
What didn’t make it through Crossover Day
A Republican-backed proposal angling for landlord registries, House Bill 374, would allow local governments to create “housing management databases” to log contact details of companies that own “at least 10 contiguous dwelling units.” But it never crossed over to the Senate, due to stiff opposition from real estate groups like the Georgia Association of REALTORS.
Likewise, House Bill 305 — the “Protect the Dream Act” — seeks to prohibit investment funds with at least $6.25 million in assets or 25 single-family homes in any county from buying more statewide. The bill, authored by Rep. Phil Olaleye (D-Atlanta), got one House committee hearing and then fell by the wayside.
“We don’t believe in capping who can buy and sell property in the state of Georgia,” Georgia REALTORS’ Betsy Bradfield said during the Feb. 25 committee hearing.
And the Democrat-led “End Rental Price-Fixing Act,” House Bill 679, would prohibit Georgia landlords from using AI-powered rent-setting software, which determines rent prices for nearly 25% of U.S. rental housing. But like HB 374 and HB 305, it got stuck in the House.
Homeownership cap stunted
The most ambitious push to stem institutional investors’ control over local housing markets was House Bill 555, legislation to prohibit real-estate investors from owning more than 2,000 single-family or 10 multi-family properties statewide. The Republican-led “Georgians First Residential Property Protection Act,” authored by Rep. Derrick McCollum (R-Chestnut Mountain), gave investors four years to comply by selling assets and imposed $15,000 fines per extra housing unit for violators.
Despite bipartisan support in the House Judiciary Committee, McCollum couldn’t get HB 555 to the House floor for a vote by Crossover Day. The housing-cap bill got a late start in the legislative session, since it wasn’t introduced until Feb. 20. But it also drew resistance from powerful lobbyists, including Georgia’s former attorney general, Sam Olens.
Representing the National Home Rental Council, Olens told the House Judiciary Committee on March 3 that HB 355 clashed with capitalist sensibilities and could infringe on personal property rights enshrined in the Georgia Constitution. What’s more, he argued, the 2,000-home cap is an “arbitrary restriction,” based on scant evidence of monopolization by institutional investors.
“I’m speaking for the vast majority of free-market people when I say that this is a terrible bill,” Olens said. “I’m taken aback by how companies that follow the law — and are listed in many of our mutual funds [and] many of our retirement funds — are, in this bill, just determined to be evil corporate citizens.”
McCollum and Georgia housing advocates backing HB 555 pushed back on Olens’ claim that there’s insufficient evidence of institutional investors wreaking havoc on housing markets.
In the five-county metro Atlanta area alone, three corporate landlords — Invitation Homes, Pretium Partners, and Amherst Holdings — own nearly 11% of the entire single-family rental market through a network of shell companies, according to a study by Georgia State University and Rutgers University researchers.
Taylor Shelton, the GSU geographer who helped author that study, said that the legislature’s inability to pass HB 555 and related legislation means Wall Street investors will continue to tighten their grip on housing markets statewide.
“Without these kinds of interventions, Georgia tenants and prospective homebuyers are going to continue to be squeezed and pushed out of the market by these companies in their continual drive to extract as much profit as possible from our communities,” he told Atlanta Civic Circle in a text message.
Looking forward
McCollum said he’s going to keep pushing for HB 555 in the off-season and during next year’s legislative session. “Georgia is number one on the hit list for these private-equity groups,” the Republican lawmaker said.
He’s even willing to bump up the cap on single-family home ownership to 4,000 or more units to appease “the realtors working against me, who are pretty powerful,” he added in an interview.
Rep. Martin Momtahan (R-Dallas), who proposed allowing landlord registries, said he’ll keep fighting for his bill, HB 374, too. Institutional investors own more than 80% of the single-family homes in his North Georgia district — evidence that this is not just an urban issue, he said. Momtahan believes his colleagues may need further education on housing markets’ corporate takeover before they buy into bills like his.
“These are not empty or easy measures,” Momtahan said in an interview. “They’re making major changes to our economy, so these things have to be balanced, carefully crafted, and calculated.”
To that end, Olaleye — the Democrat sponsoring HB 305 to limit how many homes big funds can buy — has introduced a resolution to create a House study committee examining Wall Street’s influence over Georgia housing markets.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you had interest on both sides of the aisle to discuss solutions to this issue,” Olaleye said in an interview. “They just need more time to suss out the severity.”